The Divine Dance

Author: Richard Rohr

Trinity

I want to approach God with humility. I’m also careful not to grant that kind of credence to mere dogma and traditions. Whom we grant authority, we subject ourselves to. We may critique and constrain the rest of the world like a sieve, but where we bend the knee, we grant access to our soul.

Assorted Reflections

We see God as a cosmic spectator, and we always become what we behold.

“The vast majority of Christians are afraid of God.”

If we become what we worship, and we don’t like who we’ve become, we need a clearer, more loving view of God. (For related ideas, see section “How We Picture God” in this review of Cross Vision.)

Painful tears at being reminded of the unity of all things in the face of very dualistic Christian thinking. How do we get at the deeper truths when so much theology, claiming to speak for God, echoes the competitive truths of the world? Can we receive it all as from His hand, or is some of it of Satan and therefore to be resisted and rejected? The message of Job is that even if it is from Satan, accepting it as from God can transform everything.

If God is anything, as far as we can tell, He is extremely permissive. But then that would also be true if He didn’t exist at all.

If the reality of the trinity is so foundational to knowing God, why didn’t Jesus teach it more explicitly?

Holy people are those who can stay in relationship at all costs.

Human strength admires autonomy. God’s weakness is inter-being.

We admire self-sufficiency. The trinity honors reliance on the other.

We substitute uniformity for unity, obedience for love, and conformity for loyalty to our deepest identity.

Epistemology: Rohr suggests that there is a bodily knowing as well as a spiritual knowing, the latter mediated by the Holy Spirit.

We all discover eventually that our hearts and souls will not be fed at the trough of self-seeking.

What if our way of life could inspire openness rather than entrenchment?

We call the Bible the word of God, but Jesus is the only unequivocally endorsed Word of God in the pages of Scripture.

Each of us, at times, feels inclined to explore. But if we see the outer world as essentially evil or dangerous, we will cling to the familiar and tell ourselves that what we already have is all we’ll ever need.

When we see things contemplatively, everything in the universe is a mirror.

Narcissism

Jesus’s inclusion of the outsider, his love of the Samaritan, shatters every unconscious paradigm of self-congratulating in-group narcissism.

Sin is always a refusal of mutuality, an affirmation of separateness. Whenever we isolate ourselves and become closed off to the process of giving and receiving, we shut out the Holy Spirit. True evil often disguises itself as appropriate boundary-keeping.

The one thing the ego hates and fears more than anything else is change.

A Trinitarian person who is in formation is someone being freed of the chains of narcissism.

Scotis: True love for the self always overflows in love for the other. It is one and the same love. Your freedom to extend love to others always gives you a sense of dignity and power in yourself. You cannot have one without the other. In fact, trying to love others without a foundational reverence for yourself ends up as neediness, manipulation, and infatuation, expressing itself as endless battles of codependency. Trying to love yourself and not to love others is what we mean by narcissism.

Humility Through Seeking

It’s much harder to stay in the always-vulnerable river of Life than to cling to a strong moral stance on some point of doctrine. Rohr says this clinging is what the unconverted do.

“Saved by faith” takes on a different meaning if it refers to a faith that lives in a state of restful trust in a loving Father, rather than a mere expectation of skirting damnation.

The very meaning of faith stands in stark contrast to the mindset of certitude. We have to live in exquisite, terrible humility before reality. It’s only the ongoing search for understanding that creates compassionate, wise people. Rational certitude is exactly what the Scriptures do not offer us. They offer us instead the opportunity to learn to live by faith. People who live by faith never stop growing, are not easily defeated, and are fun to live with.

A Trinitarian life is able to hold a beautiful form of creative tension in this world. Not afraid to be dependent while also not afraid to be self-sufficient.

The Image Within

All personhood is created through mirroring. We gradually become the image we reflect.

“The degree to which you can see the divine image, especially where you’d rather not, tells me how operative the divine image is within you.”

• “You are the projector and the world is your projection.” Byron Katie
• “People seem not to notice that their opinions about the world are really a confession of a character.” Emerson
• What we see when we look out is determined by what is already within.
• “To the pure, all things are pure.” Titus 1:15

Personhood is something God has shared with us, being made in His image. Personhood implies a process of coming to be in love. Sin is every refusal to move toward love in this process.

From neuroscience: Fear, hatred, and negativity stick to our neurons like Velcro, while gratitude, positivity, and appreciation slide off like Teflon unless we dwell on them for at least 15 seconds.

Mysticism, Ways of Knowing

Cataphatic: seen according to the light; clearly defined words; clear concepts, pictures, and rituals.

Apophatic: seen according to darkness; knowing beyond words and images, through silence, darkness, releasing the need to know.

Mystical truths are, categorically, non-empirical, and yet they must still, in some way, square with our experience of the world; they must make sense in some way, even though they cannot be proven. How to understand this?

People tell me I won’t understand God as long as I insist on being logical. What can they mean by this blatantly logical claim? That God can only be known by the illogical?

“God refuses to be known by the mind. Real prayer, real knowing, is about God in us knowing God. Only He can know himself, so only his Spirit in us can enable us to know Him.”

Paul’s attempt to describe an alternative way of knowing:

Among the mature, however, we speak a message of wisdom — but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. No, we speak of the mysterious and hidden wisdom of God, which He destined for our glory before time began… not in words taught us by human wisdom, but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words. The natural man does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God. For they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned. (1 Cor 2:6, 7, 13, 14)

All knowledge of God is participatory knowledge. Neither fundamentalism nor scientific atheism know how to know. Divine knowing is allowing Someone else to know for us, even as us.

Changing the Mind

We still have a largely pagan view of God.

Hasn’t God shared a great deal of power with us just by creating us and permitting us to exercise our will? What must be the temperament of the God who would share power in this way?

“I have always eaten generously of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The categories are clear in my mind, which makes judging come naturally. Kindness and forbearance, much less so.”

“Incarnation, rightly appreciated, is already redemption… The mystery of incarnation is already revealing God’s total embrace. The baby in the crib already proclaims ‘I like you, I want to be one with you.’”

The Cross did not change the mind of the Father… The cross was needed as a dramatic, earth-shaking icon to change our minds about God.

To know the Lord and his ways has very little to do with intelligence and very much to do with a wonderful mixture of confidence and surrender. People who live in this way tend to be the calmest and happiest people I know.

Figures of Note

Tertulian (150–240AD), “the founder of western Christian theology,” coined the term Trinity. The evangelical doctrine of hell can also be traced to him.

Boetheus (480–524AD), who wrote Consolations of Philosophy, taught us to see our humanity in terms of individuality and rationality as opposed to relational and intuitive.